Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (29 page)

 
          
 
Lord Kelvin nodded his head, which turned into
a quadrant electrometer. In his hand he held a mariner's compass of his own
invention. The needle pointed east with awful, mystifying significance.

 
          
 
"I knew what it . . . what it was,"
St. Ives said remorsefully. "But I wanted the machine for myself, to work
my own ends, not yours. I've given up science for personal gain." He
couldn't help being truthful.

 
          
 
"You'll never be raised to the peerage
with that attitude, lad."

 
          
 
St. Ives noticed suddenly that the mole with
Parsons's face was studying him out of its squinty little eyes. Hurriedly, it
turned around and scampered away across the meadow, carrying a suitcase. Lord
Kelvin looked at his pocket watch, which swung on the end of a length of
transatlantic cable. "If he hurries he can catch the 2:30 train to London.
He'll arrive in time."

 
          
 
He showed the pocket watch to St. Ives. The
crystal was enormous, nearly as big as the sky, filling the landscape,
distorting the images behind it like a fishbowl. St. Ives squinted to make
things out. The hands of the watch jerked around their course, ticking loudly.
Behind them, on the watch face, a figure moved through the darkness of a rainy
night. It was St. Ives himself, wading through ankle-deep water. It was
fearsomely

 
          
 
slow
going. Like
quicksand, the water clutched his ankles. Going round and round in his head was
a hailstorm of regrets—if only the ships hadn't gone down, if he hadn't missed
his train, if he hadn't come to ruin on the North Road, if he could tear
himself loose now from the grip of this damnable river . . . He wiped rainwater
out of his eyes. Crouched before him in the street was Ignacio Narbondo, a
smoking pistol in his hand and a look of insane triumph on his face.

 
          
 
St. Ives jackknifed awake again. The air of
the cabin was cold and wet, and for a moment he imagined he was once more in
the bathyscaphe, on the bottom of the sea. But then he heard Uncle Botley shout
and then laugh, and the voice, especially the laughter, seemed to St. Ives to
be a wonderful fragment of the living world—something he could get a grip on,
like a cottage pie.

 
          
 
St. Ives studied his face in the mirror on the
wall. He was thin and sallow. He felt a quick surge of terror without an
object, and he realized abruptly that he had gotten old. He seemed to have the
face of his father. "Time and chance happeneth to them all," he
muttered, and he went out on deck in the gathering night, where the lights of
Grimsby
slipped past off the starboard bow, and the
waters of the
Humber
lost themselves in the
North Sea
.

           
 
ST. IVES SAT in the chair in his study. It was
a dim and wintry day outside, with rain pending and the sky a uniform gray. He
had been at work on the machine for nearly six months, and success loomed on
the horizon now like a slowly approaching ship. There had been too little sleep
and too many missed or hastily eaten meals. His friends had rallied around him,
full of concern, and he had gone on in the midst of all that concern,
implacably, like a rickety mill wheel. Jack and Dorothy were on the Continent
now, though, and Bill Kraken was off to the north, paying a visit to his old
mother. There was a fair chance that he wouldn't see any of them again. The
thought didn't distress him. He was resigned to it.

 
          
 
A fly circled lazily over the clutter on the
desk, and St. Ives whacked at it suddenly with a book, knocking it to the
floor. The fly staggered around as if drunk. In a fit of remorse, St. Ives
scooped it up on a sheet of paper, walked across and opened the French window,
and then dumped the fly out into the bushes. "Go," he said hopefully
to the fly, which buzzed around aimlessly, somewhere down in the bushes.

 
          
 
St. Ives stood breathing the wet air and
staring out onto the meadow at the brick silo that rose there crumbHng and
lonely, full to the top with scientific aspirations and pretensions. It looked
to him like a sorry replica of the Tower of Babel. Inside it
lay
Lord Kelvin's machine, along with Higgins's bathyscaphe. St. Ives had removed
and discarded most of the shell of the machine, hauling the useless telltale
debris away by night. What was left was nearly ready; he had only to wheedle
what might be called fme points out of the gracious Lord Kelvin, who would
abandon Harrogate for Glasgow tomorrow morning.

 
          
 
St. Ives hadn't slept in two days. Dreaming
had very nearly cured him of sleep. There would be time enough for sleep,
though. Either that, or there wouldn't be. On impulse, he left the window open,
thinking to show other flies that he harbored no ill will toward them, and then
he slumped back across to the chair and sat down heavily, sinking so that he
rested on his tailbone. A shock of hair fell across his eyes, obscuring his
vision. He harrowed it backward with his fmgers,
then
nibbled at a grown-out nail, tearing it off short and taking a fragment of skin
with it. "Ouch," he said, shaking his hand, but then losing interest
in it almost at once. For a long time he sat there, thinking about nothing.

 
          
 
Coming to himself, finally, he surveyed the
desktop. It was a clutter of stuff—tiny coils and braids of wire, miniature
gauges, pages torn out of books, many of which torn pages now marked places in
other books. There was an army of tiny clockwork toys littering the desktop,
built out of tin by William Keeble. Half of them were a rusted ruin, the
victims of an experiment he had performed three weeks past. St. Ives looked at
them suspiciously, trying to remember what he had meant to prove by spraying them
with brine and then leaving them on the roof.

 
          
 
He had waked up in the middle of the night
with a notion involving the alteration of matter, and had spent an hour
meddling with the toys, leaving them, finally, on the roof before going back to
bed, exhausted. In the morning, somehow, he had forgotten about them. And then,
days later, he had seen them from out on the meadow, still lying on the roof,
and although he remembered having put them there, and having been possessed
with the certainty that putting them there was good and right and useful, he
couldn't for the life of him recall why.

 
          
 
That sort of thing was bothersome—periods of
awful lucidity followed by short bursts of rage or by wild enthusiasm for some
theoretical notion having to do with utter nonsense. Moodily, he poked at the
windup duck, which whirred momentarily to life, and then fell over onto its
side. There were ceramic figures, too, sitting among comical Toby mugs and
glass gewgaws, some few of which had belonged to Alice.
Balls
of crumpled paper lay everywhere, along with broken pens and graphite crumbs
and fragments of India-rubber erasers.
A lake of spilled ink had long
ago dried beneath it all, staining the brown oak of the desktop a rich purple.

 
          
 
Filled with a sudden sense of purpose, he
reached out and swept half the desk clear, the books and papers and tin toys
tumbling off onto the floor. Carefully, he straightened the glass and ceramic
figurines, setting a little blue-faced doggy alongside a Humpty Dumpty with a
ruff collar. He stood a tiptoeing ballerina behind them, and then, in the
foreground, he
lay
a tiny glass shoe full of sugar
crystals. He sat back and looked at the collection, studying it. There was
something in it that wasn't quite satisfying, that wasn't—what?
Proportionate, maybe.
He turned the toe of the glass shoe
just a bit. Almost . . . He rotated the Humpty Dumpty so that it seemed to be
regarding the ballerina,
then
slid the dog forward so
that its head rested on the toe of the shoe.

 
          
 
That was it. On the instant, meaning had
evolved out of simple structure. Something in the little collection reminded
him of something else. What?
Domestic tranquillity.
Order.
He smiled and shook his head nostalgically, yearning
for something he couldn't recall. The comfortable feeling evaporated into the
air. The nostalgia, poignant as it had been for that one moment, wasn't
connected to anything at all, and was just so much vapor, an abstraction with
no concrete object. It was gone now, and he couldn't retrieve it. Maybe later
he would see it again, when he wasn't trying so hard.

 
          
 
Frowning, he returned to the window where he
worked his fingers through his hair again. There was a broken hmb on the bush
where he had dropped the fly, as if someone had stepped into it clumsily. For a
moment he was puzzled. There hadn't been any broken limb a half hour ago.

 
          
 
A surge of worried excitement welled up in
him, and he stepped out through the window, looking up and down along the wall
of the house. Here he is again!
he
said to himself. No
one was visible, though.

 
          
 
He sprinted to the corner, bursting quickly
past it to catch anyone who might still be lurking. He looked about himself
wildly for a moment and then ran straight toward the carriage house and circled
entirely around it. The door was locked, so he didn't bother going in, but
headed out onto the meadow instead, straightaway toward the silo. He realized
that he should have fetched Hasbro along with him, or at any rate brought a
weapon.

 
          
 
He had left the silo doors double-locked,
though. They were visible from the house, too—both from the study and from St.
Ives's bedroom upstairs. Hasbro's quarters also looked out onto the meadow, and
Mrs. Langley could see the silo from the kitchen window. St. Ives had been too
vigilant for anyone to have . . . And no one had. The doors were still locked,
the locks untouched. Carefully, he inspected the ground, finding stray
shoeprints here and there. He stepped into them, realizing only then that he
was in his stocking feet. Still, there was one set of prints that were smaller
even than his unshod foot. They wouldn't belong to Hasbro, then. Possibly they
were Bill Kraken's, except that Kraken was up in Edinburgh and these prints
were fresh. Parsons! It had to be Parsons, snooping around again. Who else
could it be?
No one.

 
          
 
Finally he jogged off toward his study window,
pounding his fist over and over into his hand in a fit of nervous energy. His
mind was
a turmoil
of conflict. He had to sort things
out . . . The ground outside the French windows was soft, kept wet by water
falling off the overhanging eaves. A line of shoeprints paralleled the wall, as
if someone had come sneaking along it, stepping onto the bush in order to
sandwich himself in toward the window without being seen. In his excitement St.
Ives hadn't seen the prints, but he stooped to examine them now. The toes were
pressed deeply into the dirt, so whoever it was had been hunched over forward,
keeping low, moving slowly and heavily. Small shoeprints again, though.
Certainly not his own.

 
          
 
St. Ives hurried back into the study. He
opened a desk drawer and rooted through it, pulling out papers and books until
he found a cloth-wrapped parcel. He pulled the cloth away, revealing four white
plaster-of-Paris shoeprint casts. He turned them over, and, on the bottom,
printed neatly in ink, were dates and place-names. The first set was dated six
months past, taken in Sterne Bay from the dirt outside the icehouse. The second
pair
were
taken a week past, down along the River
Nidd. They were from different pairs of shoes of the same size.

 
          
 
He put the first pair back into the drawer and
carried the second outside, laying them into appropriate prints. They settled
in perfectly. On his hands and knees he squinted closely at one of the heel
prints in the dirt. The back outside corner of the heel was gone, worn away, so
that the heel print looked like someone's family crest, but with a quarter of
the shield lopped away. An image leaped into his mind of Parsons walking along
in his usual bandy-legged gait, scuffing the leather off the corners of his
heels. The heels on the plaster casts were worn out absolutely identically.
There couldn't be any doubt, or almost none. Parsons had come snooping around.
He couldn't have been entirely positive that the man he had seen skulking along
the river had been Parsons. It had been late evening, and drizzling. Whoever it
had been, though, it was the same man who, within the last half hour or so, had
sneaked along the wall of the house, stepped into the bush and broke off the
limb, and then, no doubt, peered in at the window.